Grrl Power #713 – Bloopberry or malted flerg?

So first off, yes the page is screwy. If you’re on the home page and you can’t see a comic, just click on the title above (Grrl Power #713 etc.) and you should be able to see it. I had some back end work done including moving everything to an updated theme, and I don’t have all the CSS back in place yet. I should have the page back to looking cromulent by the end of the week hopefully. On the plus side, future proofing! Also I should be able to make non-comic posts and edit previously posted stuff, which I haven’t been able to do for a few weeks now. I’ll have to go back and put in all those direct links to the patreon comic for the ones I missed. Also, I need to make Who’s Who badges for the rest of Cora’s crew, but I want to get the page settled before I mess with that stuff.

This is kind of a transitional page, mostly just covering the Grakz aftermath and then moving them to a weirdly spartan kitchen. If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen me complain about various stuff I don’t like drawing – perspective correct backgrounds is a big one, but honestly one of the most difficult and tedious things to draw is stuff like a set table. Silverware, plates, cups, centerpiece stuff like? Man that takes a surprising amount of time to draw correctly. I could just say that Altus keeps his kitchen so tidy you could perform surgery in it but that’d still be a bit of a cop out. I just sort of ran out of time to come up with alien kitchen gadgets and I was having too much fun drawing Altus’s obliques.

So speaking of alien milkshakes… if a race has access to sugar and dairy, or a dairy like substance at least, it’s a fair bet they’d have come up with something like ice cream. Personally I’m blown away by bread. That doesn’t happen accidentally. You have to take this grass stuff, which I would only think people would consider food once they saw animals eating it, then pluck these little grains out of it by hand, then grind it up, mix in water and cook. Forget all the baking soda and yeast and eggs and whatever else, the first piece of ‘bread’ was probably like a cracker where someone got some wheat grains wet and it sat on a hot rock and they ate it anyway. The evolution from that to shit like croissants makes total sense to me, but the very first caveman who invented bread had to have done it by accident.

BUT I DIGRESS. The point is, space ice cream is totally realistic because people like experimenting with food. Whether or not there’s such a thing as space vanilla is another matter. Sydney has to choose if her milkshake will be blin flavored, cahola, bloopberry, shabazoz, or flerg. Oh, what does blin taste like you ask? Well, it’s like flibbib, but more shoozy, and with a hint of glulb. Yeah. The Universal Translator is of no help here, because there’s no equivalent flavors on Earth.

Discussion (277) ¬

Yeah, I often have similar thoughts about food. “Who thought to do ANY of this?”

This bewilderment is also reflected in one of my favourite Fact Sphere quotes from Portal 2: “The first person to discover that cow’s milk is drinkable was very, very thirsty.”

(Though oddly that’s actually one of the more understandable cases — it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to conclude that if one’s own milk is drinkable, another species’ milk might be drinkable too.)

I figure that a lot of “first foods” came from watching animals. Various sized birds, for example, picking up critters and dropping them on rocks to get at the creamy middle. Oysters, clams, that sort of thing. Bears knocking salmon onto shore. Everything and its prey trying to get the turtles before they make it into the surf – and after. “They eat it – must be good.”

I’ve heard that lobster was considered a trash food for a long time. People in Maine and similar lobster-adjacent places would bury the shells rather than throw them out so their neighbors wouldn’t know they were ‘reduced’ to eating the things. Then some enterprising robber baron decided to start serving them on his railway as an exotic dinner, and the transition was made from trash food to delicacy.

There is a somewhat well-known statement about Scottish food: all Scottish food started as a dare.

Given that Scotland is the source of haggis which is moderately frightening by description (haven’t had it; the US won’t import it, American restaurants don’t serve it, and I’m too lazy to make it), I have some inclination to believe it. Same goes for deep fried Mars bars. If Scotch eggs are truly Scottish, they make me doubt it, ’cause they are tasty.

It’s kind of weird how the first thing that I noticed about this page wasn’t the beefcake or the still-too-obvious-bahonkadonkers, but the fact that you went for the details and made Sydney visibly pale.

“Too-obvious”? They’re just as obvious as she likes in the comfort of her own ship where she is the master, and has her own space-harem of beefcake. I, for one, would not try to tell her to put away her chest-cannons, as I like my arse un-kicked.

Considering Sydney is whiter than a whiteboard, yeah, fairly sure Cora has noticed something, and set up this scene to put some colour back in her cheeks (well, her facial cheeks, her butt doesn’t need any help in that regard right now :P )

But no look at Hákarl.
– You catch a Greenland shark (it is poisonous but why not).
– You dig a hole, put in the shark, cover it and use a big stone to press out the liquids for up to three months.
– Then you hang it in stripes and dry it a few more months.
– And before serving you remove the crust and it still stinks of ammonia…
To get to that process someone really wanted to eat that shark.

Yup. But not much food up there, so they would have gone to a lot of effort, during lean times.

Just look at how people cope during extreme situations, such as when Hitler was trying to blockade the UK, or even more so during the siege of Leningrad. Even non-edible things like boots found themselves being subjected to cooking experiments!

Actually, I’m going to guess that making dough was mostly intentional. You see animals eating grain, so, like other foods, you try it, but grains are tough to eat. the notion of grinding up hard foods isn’t too hard a leap for any society with a pestle. So now you have flour, but it’s unpleasantly dry, so you add water and holy Ptah, you’ve got bread-dough. After that, you’re most of the way there–it’s the realization that heating it will make it better that might’ve been accidental; although even then, if you’re used to cooking meat on a fire at that point, it’s not too hard a leap to figure other things might be interesting with a bit of heat, too.

In some cultures, the first “bread” was made out of a combination of water and mashed acorns. Plus stone chips because it was ground on the only cutting board available- a huge granite boulder that was kind of flat.

Raw Jalapeños wouldn’t exactly have been a pleasant introductory experience but humanity is much more likely to have started with something like Chiltepins – A variety with tiny, berry-like fruit that’s more than ten times the heat of a Jalapeño and grows readily in the wild in south america. Just don’t believe its wikipedia page because it’s full of ridiculous fallacies.

I think we need to see the buttons for comment pages at the top as well as the bottom. Comments on the previous pages didn’t get much attention before, and as it is now you can’t even tell there are more comments until you scroll all the way down.

Pander I direct your attention to a story called Death worlders, in which Humans are considered monstrously awesome. Basically, We come from a world so deadly to other sapient species they call us death worlders, Gravity too high, Pathogens too deadly, Predators Too Deadly etc. Compared to us even the most dangerous Sapient species in that universe are nothing more than wet tissue paper.

and Yes we have about 20 years or so before it is too late and our climate is permanantly fucked

Forget bread. CHEESE. Anyone here know what rennet is? I’ll tell you. Now days you can get it in a bottle, but back in the day the only way to get rennet, the catalyst needed to make cheese, was to take the stomach of a calf that was still breast feeding and extract it from that. The easiest way was to just salt and dry the stomach lining, then drop chunks of it in a batch of milk to get the cheese started.

Using the lining in pieces came much later when the process was more sophisticated. Originally the milk was just being stored / transported in the stomachs, which were one of the only waterproof vessels available for handling liquids. The curdling and associated preservation benefits were almost undoubtedly discovered by accident.

“The most exciting phrase in science is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …’” –variously attributed to Asimov and Fleming

That’s actually a good point. From their perspective, it’s probably been well over a day since Sydney got marooned. If this is after the stated ‘time for a nap & a meal’ that Cora used to describe the travel time to Earth, then it’s probably closer to 2-days now?

Cora must have phoned back to Dabbler….unless the method that Dabbler used to transmit her message requires similar power levels to receive for some inexplicable reason….no way that Jiggawatt could keep up that kind of power output for days on end waiting for a reply.

I was thinking of who has clearance for Sydney’s to tell about her space adventure.
I can imagine Sydney coming in and saying “guess what just happened to me” and someone from the intelligent agency running in and trying to stop her.

As a W.A.G.: It’ll be The General and Maxima for sure, Dabbler because she IS an alien, Probably Major Hiro because he’s the XO? and after that nobody else, other than Arc-light/Dark in the debrief?… YET… i assume that Harem will be “Read In” on the fact aliens exist and that Sciona was one of them and that’s where they went … but will that include Dabbler in that process as well? or do the NCO’s in Archon (Corp. and above) already know about her? i seem to recall something about corporals getting told SOMETHING, but i’m not remembering exactly WHAT they get told…

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